The embodiments described herein relate to collaborative environments in which a document is created and edited by a team of users who can concurrently work on the document over time to create and edit the document.
Data processing systems for providing a collaborative environment to create and edit the document by multiple users, who are often creating and editing the document concurrently in time, have existed for some time. For example, Google Wave and Google Does are examples of applications which can provide real time collaboration. One technology that has been used to facilitate such applications is a technology referred to as operational transformation which supports a range of collaboration functionalities are advanced collaborative software systems. Operational transformation was originally developed for consistency maintenance and concurrency control in collaborative editing of plain text documents. Sec for example Ellis, C. A.; Gibbs, S. J. (1989), “Concurrency control in groupware systems”, ACM SIGMOD Record 18(2): 399-407.